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Go Online, Beat a Puzzle and Become a British Spy

Government Communications Headquarters, a British spy agency, is using a game to recruit.Credit
Reuters

LONDON — Psst! Wanna be a spy?

Back in the cloak-and-dagger days of secret intelligence work, Britain’s espionage agencies liked to recruit in the ivied colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, even if that brought them some of the most notorious turncoats of the 20th century, men like Kim Philby and other Cambridge spies who handed atom bomb secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s before defecting to Moscow.

In the Internet age, the spy catchers have been forced to go digital, democratic and, old-timers might say, outright pop. Their latest wheeze, causing a buzz on the Internet — and stirring a torrent of Web chat among people identifying themselves as hackers — is an online cryptographic puzzle that promises a fast track to recruitment as spies for those who solve it before the challenge expires on Dec. 11.

According to traffic on Twitter, Facebook and scores of other Web sites, at least 50 people have solved the puzzle since it was posted unobtrusively last month. To all but practiced cryptographers, it looks baffling: a rectangular display of 160 letters and numbers, grouped in twos in blue against a black background, under the overline, “Can you crack it?” Beneath it, a digital clock ticks down the seconds left until the competition closes.

The agency that posted the puzzle at www.canyoucrackit.co.uk is one of the oldest, and, espionage experts say, most successful eavesdropping organizations anywhere, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, located in a vast doughnut-shaped building surrounded by huge satellite dishes in parkland near Cheltenham, 120 miles west of London.

Helped by a hand-in-glove relationship with its American counterpart, the National Security Agency, which provides access to data downloaded from a pervasive network of American spy satellites, GCHQ can hack into phone calls, e-mails and computers virtually anywhere in the world. With language experts speaking everything from Amharic to Kazakh and 70 tongues besides, it has played a crucial role in cracking some of the biggest terror plots against the West in recent years.

Once decrypted, the agency’s online puzzle, through a process experts call steganography, yields a hidden message in the form of a keyword. Those who enter the keyword are led to a Web address, where they are greeted with a congratulatory note. It is signed by a group calling itself Cyber Security Specialists, a newly formed unit within the British agency that is responsible for combating the cyberespionage threat that British officials have listed alongside terrorism, organized crime, and drug and weapons smuggling among the nation’s biggest security threats.

“So you did it,” says the congratulatory message. “Now this is where it gets interesting. Could you use your skills and ingenuity to combat terrorism and cyberthreats? As one of our experts, you’ll help protect our nation’s security and the lives of thousands.” Those interested are then invited to submit a formal job application, leading to interviews for a total of 35 jobs next spring.

Some skeptics, believing there is nothing particularly innovative in the new world of spycraft beyond updated technologies, have noted that recruiting techniques used by the World War II code-breaking agency that was GCHQ’s predecessor included presenting candidates, many of them from Oxford and Cambridge, with cryptographic crossword puzzles. Other skeptics on the Internet have dismissed the GCHQ puzzle as too easy.

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The spy agency has insisted it is not. A spokesman described the puzzle as a follow-up on unusual methods it has used in the past to reach potential computer-age recruits who might escape traditional methods, which have included discreet advertisements in high-end magazines and newspapers. The newer tactics have included posting video content and downloadable information about the agency on the Web, and cyberpuzzles on popular video games like Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed.

“Code-cracking skills are vital to secure the very best talent and to support the GCHQ mission in its fight against cyberthreats,” the spokesman told The Daily Telegraph. “Our target audience is not typically attracted to traditional advertising methods. Their skills may be ideally suited to our work, and yet they may not understand how they could apply them to the working environment.”

Many computer experts writing for British newspapers and Web sites suggested that the spy agency’s message, at least implicitly, was that it was looking for accomplished hackers, a community that has been bruised lately in the backwash from the scandal enveloping Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire.

The agency, in listing the qualifications it requires of recruits, said it would accept only British citizens and would rule out anyone who had engaged in illegal hacking. But some of its other specifications suggested that it might not look askance at candidates who have trodden close to the legal line. While saying it was looking for “good people” with a strong sense of fairmindedness, it also emphasized the value of a buccaneering spirit.

“In a game where our adversaries operate with no known rules and unknown boundary lines, you will be exploring the possibilities and inventing the seemingly impossible,” the agency said on its Web site.

Those pressing the agency to lift its game have included Prime Minister David Cameron, whose government has noted GCHQ’s past inability to recruit and retain “a suitable cadre of Internet specialists,” partly because its entry salaries — averaging about $48,000, far less than what private companies offer for the same skills — are uncompetitive. William Hague, the foreign secretary, said recently that the government was the target of as many as 600 attacks on its computer systems every day.

But judging by the response to the spy agency’s puzzle, the government faces an uphill struggle, partly because in the community of hackers, government itself is uncool, if not the enemy. One hacker going by the name Ady who entered a comment on the BBC’s Web site urged the agency to “stick to employing upper-class twits from Oxford and Cambridge.” Hackers, called “hobbyists” in the post, know that “governments are not really the sort of people you want to get involved with,” Ady said.

Another contributor put the government’s problem — finding hackers to combat hackers — in a nutshell. “Hire Gary McKinnon,” the person wrote, referring to a Scottish hacker accused of intruding into nearly 100 Pentagon computer networks a decade ago. He is fighting extradition to the United States for what American officials have described as “the biggest military computer hack of all time.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 3, 2011, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Go Online, Beat a Puzzle, And Become A British Spy. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe